The Master/Servant Relationship: A Medieval Horror Romance
Once upon a time there was a great chain of being. Up the top was God; down at the bottom were all the inanimate objects. Actually, somewhere beneath all this, below the rocks and lost socks and broken toasters in a kind of hidden underground lair, were the Devil and his minions. As for you and I, we were stationed at different points along the way depending upon our status. Kings were below angels; vassals below lords; apprentices below craftsmen; and wives below husbands. And there wasn’t much point in grizzling about it; all this was divinely ordained so we just had to lump it.
What we now call ‘English common law’ developed out of this medieval compost. Over the centuries, hallowed principles were codified into exacting social rules. Detailed treatises and regulations were drawn up to determine how people on different levels should relate to each other. Some of the central planks that emerged from this work of ages were the parent-child relationship, the husband-wife relationship, the guardian-ward relationship, and (our subject here) the master-servant relationship.
All of this ought to be the stuff of historical footnotes. However, English common law still underpins the legal systems of a large number of countries. The list includes the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, South Africa, Malaysia, Ireland, Australia, Brunei, Pakistan, Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand. To make matters worse, through the process we now call colonialism, several of these feudal relationships leached across cultures, and have now become a kind of ‘default setting’ for most countries. In particular, the master-servant relationship sets the general tenor for industrial relations worldwide. Trade arrangements reinforce it further, and it has been quietly hard-wired into international labour law. Perhaps we no longer hold cherubim below seraphim, beetles below ladybirds, or yew trees below olive trees, but our life at work is still very much configured around this medieval template.
The law relating to employment relationships is based on the traditional “master/servant” relationship. In this relationship, the servant works at the direction of the master and engages in work for the benefit of the master. In return, the master compensates the servant for his or her labors. This traditional relationship of master and servant has evolved into the law of agency…
Society for Human Resource Management, the world’s largest HR association[2]
The first thing I tell students when I teach employment law is that it remains rooted in the master-servant relation.
Prof Eric Fink, US law professor and lecturer [3]
If you take a look at case law around the world, including decisions by the ILO, you’ll find innumerable cases where learned judges have weighed the underlying structures of power in a workplace relationship, and then used this to determine the industrial nature of the conflict. The master-servant relationship is not just a feature of employment – it actively defines it.
Traditionally, trade unions have tried to make the workplace relationship more fair, rather than challenging the validity of underlying relationships. They have sought better conditions, higher pay, a safer working environment. These are all things that can be won (and have been, often) without affecting lines of power. There have been internal debates about this from time to time, but seldom do working people – the unions’ members – demand anything more than “the same, but better”. In fact the majority of organizations that have deliberately set aside the notions of master and servant have done so for idealistic reasons that held sway at management level. We will look at this in more detail below.
Workers’ rights (and wrongs)
Most of us take it for granted that we set aside our civil rights when we enter a workplace. It is not just that we exchange our services for a wage – we tacitly descend to a lower order. We might do so unconsciously, or humbly, perhaps even resentfully, but in the back of our minds we know there is no choice. Open defiance invites sanction. We might have our hours cut, our pay docked, miss out on a bonus, or perhaps even lose our job. As a result, few of us openly question “management’s right to manage”. This is true even when we see damage arising from poor decision-making. We are more likely to roll our eyes than express our views openly. From time to time we might question something, but only in so far as we feel we can get away with it. And if things go wrong though some fault of our own, well, we won’t be too surprised to find ourselves scolded like a wayward teenager. We learn to suppress our opinions. Perhaps the most grotesque proof of how deep this lesson runs is that we now speak of “work-life balance”, as if the hours we spend at work were somehow separated out from our allotted span — not even part of our own life anymore. Have we come to accept the master-servant relationship as the natural order of things? Perhaps, in some kind of secular 21st century way, we still believe it is divinely ordained?
Our shared language embeds the vertical command structure. Above us, our employers are superiors, the upper class, the higher-ups. Their directions “come down from above”, often by way of middle-management folk such as overseers and supervisors. As for us, we are the subordinates (ie lower numbers), the underlings, the lower class. Can you imagine a scenario in which an employee suggested a better way of doing things and the employer refused to take his/her advice… could a charge of “insubordination” be levelled? Of course not – the English language just wouldn’t stand for it!
Rather than a ‘great chain of being’, we frame this structure as a ladder. We “start at the bottom of the ladder” and work out way up. Promotion — “climbing the ladder” — might even lead to us “reaching the top” one day. Needless to say the rungs, like the links in the chain, are fixed. They even have their own proper nouns and pay grades.
The odd thing is that all this deference is extremely out of keeping with the times.
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Conclusion
Working people want voice. Employers want to harness their smarts. Shareholders don’t much care either way. CEOs take advantage of the hiatus by lining their own pockets. At the same time, we urgently need to save what’s left of the commons. In this article we have argued that all of these problems can be addressed in the same way. The case for workplace democracy could hardly be stronger.
However, we are stuck. The master-servant relationship, and the entire edifice built upon it, is preventing any movement. This is a dilemma that only ‘the servants’ themselves can resolve. They have the objective power to do so, and they have the means. But do they have the organizational ability and the resolve to do so? It is here that we must look to unions. The answer will become clear soon enough, as we survey the growing damage and the global threat we all face.
We can exorcize the master-servant relationship. Look at what we have done to the husband-wife relationship. Doing so has been shown to produce commercial benefits as well as social ones. Furthermore, democratization would also bring a social perspective into the function of leadership.
If unions do not take up this agenda, then the workplace democracy movement will continue to be led by NGOs and a few savvy company directors. Logistics will be provided, and limited, by social networks. In the meantime, for most of us, union roles will be slowly subsumed within workplace teams and consultative bodies. The master-servant relationship will find itself protected beneath another layer of sediment.